Work is due to start very soon on optimising their brand new site, getting it search engine friendly along with a brand spanking new Google Adwords campaign and Google Places page. We will update this post very soon with news on how they are progressing.

There are multiple parts to the new plus project, dealing with every element of our “social” daily lives, below is a breakdown of what to expect.

Google Circles

The first part of the project is called Google Circles, which is aimed at creating different social circles from your Google contacts. The idea behind this is that we interact differently with people depending on the type of relationship we have with them, for example you would talk and interact with your boss differently to the way you would with your friends down the pub.

By creating different “circles” you can then interact with these circles separately, sharing photos from your night out drinking with just your friends and not your boss or in-laws! Although this is not any different to Facebook’s groups it looks like a more interactive method than the Facebook way.

Google Sparks

Google Sparks looks to provide the user specialised news & content feeds based on your interests. You simply search for something that “sparks” your desires & interests and you are provided with a list of traditional & media results. You will also be able to see what is “sparking” other people’s interests around the world (possibly via your circles also?) within a featured interests area.

Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts is Google’s attempt to implement an online video version of hanging out down the shops or at the park with your mates. Hangouts lets you inform people in your circles that you are “hanging out” and therefore are available to chat, the idea being that your friends will virtually drop in for a chat. The system will support multi person video which means a whole group of friends can potentially catch up face to face from the comfort of their own home.

Google Mobile

Google Mobile is starting off with a small collection of cool mobile phone functions.

The first one called Google Location will allow you as a user to add your location to every post you make (exactly like Facebook’s places). This will be an opt in or out feature meaning those who are concerned about privacy need not worry.

The second function which is again opt in or out is called Google Instant Upload. Instant Upload is aimed at making sure all of your mobile phone photos are backed up online and are available to share at anytime. When taking a photo on your phone the picture will be automatically uploaded to a private album on Google’s cloud server ready to be shared with your friends.

It is not clear yet whether this will also be the case for mobile video clips but this is one part of Google+ I can see being a huge success.

Google Huddle

Finally Google Huddle is a group messaging service allowing you to co-ordinate with a circle of friends making sure everyone is in the loop.

Google+ is currently available on the Adroid Market and mobile web with it coming to the App Store soon.

The new certification process requires individuals to pass a number of advanced exams, testing your knowledge of the cutting edge aspects of Google Adwords along with having an account spend of over $10,000 over a 90 day period. You can find out more here.

A big thanks to all of our clients for being part of this process and here is to higher CTR, lower CPC and a shed load of conversions!

So go on, getting reading….

1. There are over 600 million active Facebook users
2. 48% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up
3. 35+ year olds represent over 30% of the Facebook userbase
4. 57% of people talk more online than they do in real life
5. In 20 minutes on Facebook there are:
   -1 million links shared
   -1.48 million event invites
   -1.97 million friend requests accepted
   -2.71 million photos uploaded
   -2.71 messages sent
   -1.32 million photos tagged
   -1.85 million status updates
   -1.58 million wall posts; and
   -10.2 million comments made

Branding

Business pages allow you to exert your companies presence much more effectively than trying to use your own personal facebook account. On a business page you can add your company logo and change the layout and look to make the experience much more like visiting a website thus keeping your branding consistent across all platforms both online and offline. This leaves you free to maintain your personal friendships out of the limelight of your professional responsibilities.

SEO

Google and other search engines love social media!

Business pages on Facebook (unlike personal pages) are constantly crawled by search engines for their every growing content, this means that all of the posts you post to your fan base can and will be indexed by Google which means it can be potentially found by people searching on Google and the other engines.

Linking back to content on your own website from your business page will encourage others to link to your content, which in turn not only drives great traffic and business to your site but will also help you improve your website rankings.

Worldwide Forum

• There are 1,723,500 Facebook users 18 years or older in Ireland
• There are over 600 Million users on Facebook worldwide (100 times the population of Ireland)
• The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes a day on Facebook
• 50% of Facebook users login every single day

Unlimited Fans

Business pages have unlimited fans/likes where as personal pages have a limit of 5000 friends.

5000 friends may seem like a figure that you would never reach, especially for smaller businesses, but the other good thing about the business page is that you can contact all of your “fans” at one time via updates, where you would be limited from a personal page. Besides why put a limit on something that you do not have to right?

Analytics

With Facebook Insights you can track how people interact with your business page by demographic (location, age, gender etc.)  and interaction (with posts, comments, images attracted the most attention) meaning you can continually fine tune the content you output to keep your audience happy and engaged.

Add Another Shop Window

You can setup your Facebook page to sell products directly to your fan base without the need to send them to your main website. This means that you ca

Interaction

With Facebook you can interact with your customer base on a totally different level than you normally would on most company websites. You can conduct market research by running Poll’s, initate debates, ask questions of your customers and vica versa along with sharing photos, videos and other content.

Media

It has never been easier to post multimedia files to your target customer base. With Facebook you dont need an expensive website CMS to post photos, vidoes and audio files which is priceless when it comes to engaging with your customers. The more varied and interesting content you keep putting up on your page the more fans you will keep and attract.

Events

Facebook is an ideal way of informing your fans and the wider public of events and attractions your company is associated with.

Who Cares About IPV6!

Ever increasing Social Networks are 1 reason why IP addresses are running low

Well you should. The testing of version 6 of the foundation layer that is the internet marks yet another sign of how “plugged in” the world has become as the Internet Protocol is a worldwide communications standard used in any piece of technology that we want to connect together.

The reason why IPV6 even has to exist is due to how terminally ill its younger sibling IPV4 is. IPV4 when it was initially conceived was thought to have more than enough room for growth as it is capable of handling 4.3 billion addresses, but now with smartphones, laptops, pc’s and more all having their own IP address we have finally run out. The last allocation of IPV4 addresses were issued in Februarymeaning we are now on a ticking clock.

The Good News!

IPV6 has been in production for the last 12 years which means real future proofing has been built in. The new address system has the capacity for 340 undecillion (that means there is alot of zeros, 37 to exact!) which means each person on the planet could have a million IP addresses assigned to them each and there would still be enough to go around!

So how do we go from IPV4 to IPV6 I hear you asking, well that’s a good point.

As with anything on this scale it seems that it might be a little tricky to integrate the two existing systems together. As they are two completely different systems, todays test will be used to see how software and hardware react to the new system, with users who are having difficulties dropping back to IPV4 as a fail safe.

Lorenzo Colitti, a Network Engineer working for Google posted these comments on the changeover

“In all likelihood, you won’t even notice the test. The vast majority (99.95%) of people will be able to access services without interruption: either they’ll connect over IPv6, or their systems will successfully fall back to IPv4. However, as with any next-generation technology, there may be teething pains. We estimate that .05% of systems may fail to fall back to IPv4, so some people may find Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and other participating websites slow or unresponsive on World IPv6 Day.”

Lorenzo puts any errors uers may experience down to faulty home network equipment like routers that can “make a computer think it has IPv6 connectivity when in fact it’s not working”.

You can test to see if you have been using IPV6 today by clicking on this link here and Google even have their IPV6 test page for those who are curious.

So what are QR codes for those who have not seen them?

Essentially they are a two dimensional barcode which allows them to store more information than a tradiitional barcode would. They can be used to store gps co-ordinates, website address information among other things. This has led them to be used as promotional tools, pioneered by Google themselves.

Google Places businesses were encouraged to use QR codes on business cards, shop windows and other promotional places to help link customers with their Places page, offers and reviews, a customer would simply scan the QR code with their phone and wait for the data to be loaded. Here is a promotional video released to show you how they were used.

Seemingly businesses have been slow to take up the new technology and now it is being shelved for the newer, easier NFC chip.

NFC chips will be shipped with new phones and will interact with decals or other shop signage that have NFC chips embedded in them. This will make the interaction with the consumer that much easier as all you will now have to do is to hold your phone up near a promotional outlet with an NFC chip emdedded and you will get the business offers and services instantly – it sure beats having to scan a barcode!

BeautyCall.ie is Ireland’s Hair and Beauty directory, helping you find highly qualified and professional hair and beauty experts and salons all over Ireland in your area of choice! Their directory covers the following areas:

• Hair
• Beauty
• Make-up
• Tanning
• Massage
• Nail Services
• Pamper Parties

BeautyCall have embarked on a full search engine optimisation campaign, focusing on optimising their onsite content to make then Ireland’s leading website for hair and beauty treatment information and service providers.

What is Google instant?

For those of you who might have missed it, on September the 8th 2010 Google unveiled an update to their search engine interface which now generates results in real time as you type.As with all new Google features it is possible to disable instant by selecting an option to the right of the search box.

How might this change things?

So I hear you asking, how does this changes things from an advertising / search engine ranking point of view? Well for one it means search has become much quicker, with reports that Google Instant can save anywhere from 2 to 5 seconds per search.

Evolved & Deeper Searching

As search results with instant show automatically as the user types it is now more likely that a searcher will review the results they get from their initial query and then look to refine their search with Google’s suggested search phrases that appear below. This creates new opportunities for keywords and phrases that you might not have already thought of.

For example when searching for our key phrase “seo company”, by the time we get to “seo com” Google has already suggested 5 search phrases for me, with the results already showing for the first phrase in the list, which happens to be seo company. So now I am in the position as a search engine user to be able to see the results of my original intended search term and I can now make a decision to look at another suggested phrase if I don’t find what I’m looking for in the first set of results. What this has done is removed my requirement for thinking up an extended search term if can’t find what I want the first time around, which can lead to lots of new search results.

So why not check out what other options Google suggest for the key phrases your currently ranking for and make sure your not missing anything out – that goes for you Google Adwords user also…

China Blue Shoes have been selling mens shoes and womens shoes from all the leading brands since 1999. They have two stores, China Blue in Dublin, and The Doc Shop in Belfast.

Loud SEO have been working with China Blue Shoes on their new website to help them attract new customers by increasing their search engine rankings.

We are proud to see China Blue topping the irish Google rankings at position 1 already for “Dublin Shoe Store” and we look forward to seeing them rise up through the rankings for their other targeted keywords. Subscribe to our Blog to keep updated…..

When to put the wheels in motion

The second a firm idea for a website has been discussed and agreed upon, this is the time when the planning stages for search engine optimisation and other forms of online advertising should start taking place.

Most website administrators think registering the domain name is enough while the planning and designing stages are taking place, with some bothering to put up a blank holding page telling any users who do stumble across the website that it is under construction and seldom little else.

From anyone interested in SEO this should be obvious that this is not a good idea. Lets have a look at 2 bad examples…

Here the domain has simply been added to hosting server and left with the default index page showing.

Here a lazy web admin has simply replaced the default server index page with a bland “under construction” message.

Neither of these is going to do anything for users or search engines.

What should a holding page have?

1) Contact details – the page needs to be clear and concise as to what the business is and where it is located. This includes full business name, address, phone/fax and email addresses.

2) Services – the page needs to educate the user what the company offers in the way of services. Ideally each service needs to have its own sub title with a description as to what the service entails.

3) Key SEO components – Make sure you have filled in the web pages meta details as well as including any links to social media applications you have setup e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc.

How to get the holding page noticed

Just by following the steps above will not get Google or the other main search engines to know your new website exists. Be sure to register the site with Google Webmaster Tools as well as introducing links with local business & directories (of relevance).

By following these simple steps your website should be at least on Google’s radar and it will have a fair idea of what your website is about by the time your fully designed website is ready to go live.